With the guest appearance of writer, novelist, screenwriter, theater and film director Dusan Kovačević, according to whose cult text "Radovan III" this year's festival co-production was made, this year's literary program of the festival continued last night at Trg pjesnika.
A large audience welcomed Kovačević with applause, who said that he was extremely glad to be back at the Gradu Teatr after 25 years.
“In my case time has now begun to be measured in centuries. Fifty years have passed since the premiere of "Radovan III", and before that premiere was "Marathonci". I was still a student at the Academy at the time. There is one fundamental and very important difference between then and now. When I wrote it in my third year, I was actually writing a story about a family that can metaphorically be the government system of an organized or disordered country. Today, you can freely insult the president of the country on the front page of any newspaper or any media, and back then you could go to prison for 10 years for a joke in a pub", he said and revealed how the famous play "Radovan III" was created with Zoran Radmilović in the lead role.
"It is a very relative story about what is better or what is worse. I actually wrote a story about a tyrant who is the boss of his house and decides the fate of his family, he is in conflict with his neighbors, which is the time to wake up in the Balkans. The subtitle of that comedy or drama is "a painful story of self-betrayal". He ends up going over to the side of the enemy. It is difficult to compare both the time and the plays because that play was marked by Zoran Radmilović, who was one of the most interesting and gifted people from the world of theater that Serbia had. Of course, in the same order with many greats, Zoran stood out for his unusual charm and gift for comedy. He marked an entire era of 20 years in Atelier 212 starting with the famous play "King Ibi". While writing that piece I thought about him and adapted it to his temperament and way of playing. When he read the play and when we met for the first time to talk, he told me "I'm going to play this, and who knows what will happen". That's how it was, the first few plays he found himself in the whole story, and at one point he took the whole story into his own hands and began to play according to what he is known for", revealed Kovačević and explained that the famous recording of the play was 250. performance.
"The show was being filmed, but he didn't know. He did not like his performances to be recorded, he had the feeling that the camera was spying on him. We installed a hidden camera on the theater balcony. When we were about to mark the 300th performance, he had played 299 games, but he was ill. He went to the hospital and did not come out. Then we made a tribute to him, we placed the television on the stage. The actors played their parts, he played on the screen and that's how the 300th play was played without him."
This year's co-production of the City Theater and the National Theater from Sombor is very good, he emphasized.
"It looks like this time that is chaotic, and what the director Vito Taufer conveyed as a feeling of something that is happening to us and that we see every day on the screens, and that is war. It is the topic of war, whether the war that was here and that has passed or this war in Ukraine. We constantly live in the threat that the war can go on. "That show really portrayed this atmosphere, it has a lot of pyrotechnics, blood and everything that we see every day", said Kovačević.
The moderator of the evening was Bojan Munjin, a journalist and theater critic who quoted one of Kovačević's statements in which he said that in the theater we must believe that the audience will come out after the performance more beautiful and smiling than when they entered.
"Today we can no longer be such optimists, but in this chaotic and rough time we can ask ourselves what is the noblest thing we can say to the audience", said Munjin, and Kovačević explained that the audience wants to leave the play with a better feeling than when they came to it. the play.
"I personally don't like great darkness, I deal with it in my pieces. However, there must be a kind of distance in relation to some events that we live everyday. I think that the theater must have that one noble soul to make a person more beautiful when he leaves the theater. Imagine that you go to the theater, you had some worries and problems, you get out and jump under the bus. There are such plays and they don't last long because the spread of depression means nothing. Some talk about you telling the truth is fine, but I am privately against you cultivating darkness. That's why my plays can be defined as tragicomedies, if I had to say a genre."
Kovačević said that the reason why someone engages in art and theater is a private decision, but that it is not good to spread your problem.
"It is treated privately, it should not be treated through someone else. There are institutions for that. My attitude towards art is very simple, which is that I can't stand violence, darkness and, above all, stupidity. When I watch a theater play or a movie, if he doesn't make some human contact with me in the first ten minutes, I stop watching. It's the same with the book, if I read some horror in the first ten pages, then I'm not interested at all. Freedom is a personal choice in anything you do, I don't believe in collective freedom because it's a utopia. And personal freedom is your private decision about how you will live, what you will do, who you will love. You just decide about it and don't expect someone else to bring it or give it to you. This is my attitude towards writing, I have experienced many things in my life, beautiful and difficult moments. I remember the good ones, and I try to forget the dark side, which is completely impossible. When I remember my friends, and many have gone and left this world, I remember only those people who are smiling. I don't want to remember those scowls at all, they were a bit problematic for me during my life. A man who laughs is a beautiful man and I believe that hard times are coming. What is happening now reminds me of the beginning of the First and Second World Wars. It started with conflicts, and then various other forces intervened and the whole story is quite threatening", said Kovačević and added that everything depends on us.
"That story about freedom is a completely private matter. You can live in a free country and be in prison with your family. You can live in a family that is happy, but the country is unhappy. I start from my attitude towards life, I don't like depression in general and I don't like to talk about it. Being sad is the easiest. Inventing stories about some important people who raised their hand, and I wrote one big story about Hemingway who called his father who killed himself a coward because he was not brave enough to live, and he killed himself with the same gun that his father used to kill himself. Then you begin to enter that vicious cycle of depression and miracles that lead you into the abyss. My theory is that a man must be brave to live, any fool can live in paradise. Come on, you live when it's complicated and when it's difficult, deal with those problems that each of us has, starting with conditions, people, health, your loved ones. Deal with it and live like a man.”
Kovačević said that in his youth he never thought that he would be involved in theater and film all his life.
"If someone had told me then that I would do what I did, I would not have believed it. However, knowing what I did not do from subjective or objective circumstances, then I regret that I did not have the opportunity or that I was not more persistent to do some things that I will never do. However, there is a rule that you will do what you are meant to do. What I didn't do, someone else will do. I asked the same question many times to Bata Stojković, with whom I spent my whole life working. I asked him if he would like to play something and tell me what role he would like to play, but he didn't play it, to which he replied that he thought he played everything he was supposed to play. Like what he didn't play was probably written for someone else. That is also my diagnosis of my relationship after more than 50 years of work."
Kovačević then read stories and verses from his book "Ja to tamo pevam", which thematizes the chronology of creativity, but also the maturation of artists. During the reading, the guest also talked about how some of the famous scenarios were created, as well as the famous songs by which the films are also remembered. The evening ended with the showing of a short film directed by Slobodan Ivetić as a tribute to Dusan Kovačević's contribution to cinematography on the occasion of celebrating fifty years of work. The film was previously shown at the "Kustendorf" festival during the awarding of the Lifetime Achievement Award "The Tree of Life" to Dušan Kovačević. At the end of the evening, the audience greeted Kovačević with a standing ovation and continued an informal conversation with the famous writer, who also signed books for those present.
Bonus video:
